Rogue builds
The Rogue is primarily a melee damage dealer. This section lists common talent builds for both dagger and sword. Talent builders can be used to test different builds or slight variants on the ones listed below, and links as well as details can be found on the Rogue talent page. Because talent trees were significantly altered in the 2.0.3 patch, old talent builds have been discarded and new talent builds have been developed. Listed below you will find several common and popular talent builds that have been tuned to maximize effectiveness. These were originally taken from the stickied forum post on the official rogue forums, but most have been heavily edited to adapt to patches. Level 70 Dagger Builds Mutilate - 41/0/20 - PvP If your focus is PvP, taking subtlety talents will give you higher burst damage and improved ability to stunlock. Having 3/3 Initiative, and 5/5 Sealfate makes it very simple to stock up on combo points. Just open up with a cheap shot and mutilate and you're ready to kidney shot. You can then use cold blood and mutilate to quickly generate more combo points for an eviscerate. Mutilate - 41/20/0 - PvE If your focus is PvE and raiding, you'll need to improve your sustainable dps with combat talents. Dual-wield specialization is the key here, in addition to a huge increase in white damage, it will actually improve your mutilate damage as well. Also, you can never go wrong with improved slice and dice and precision. The same rules apply to you as to combat rogues: white damage is king. Don't ignore your hit rating and AP. Combat Daggers - 15/41/5 Combat dagger builds are about on par with combat swords now with the ever so slight sword spec nerf of 2.2. This build uses backstab as its primary attack. Combat potency will yield great energy regen because of the typical OH speeds of daggers. S2 Shiv is a very solid OH choice. Like any rogue build using SnD is key to keeping DPS up. Seal Fate / Premed - 30/0/31 This is a PvP build that takes burst damage and combo point generation from Seal Fate and adds cooldown management with Prep. Dirty Deeds, Premed and Initiative. It offers the ability to open with 5 CP for huge opening and CB for high finishing damage. Imp Ambush with CB for big openers, and Elusiveness for shorter cooldowns. Shadowstep Build - 20/0/41 This is a PvP build that features extremely high burst damage. It gives you use of all of the good subtlety talents and just enough of the assassination ones to give you the extra power you need. It also provides +10% Attack Power and +15% agility. Sword/Fist/Mace Builds Combat Swords - 19/42/0 Combat swords is tops DPS right now by a slim margin. Make sure you find yourself a quick offhand, Latro's Shifting Sword from Black Morass for instance, and hold on to it until you get an epic upgrade (Season 2 Off-Hand works fine). Be careful not to offhand anything slower than 1.5s, or you'll miss too many combat potency procs. Also, make sure to stack up hit rating to further improve potency procs, and AP for steady white damage. You can easily switch out swords for either mace or fist spec. For fists you'll want to grab the Reflex Blades from Arcatraz and Warp Splinter's Thorn from Botanica. The 1.3s offhand dagger will work out much better for you than any offhand fist you can get, except the PvP offhands. Searing Sunblade makes a nice upgrade when you can afford it. Don't worry about trying to take dagger spec talents, it's not worth it. Hemo - 27/3/31 Stunlocks got harder to do in BC, with the massive stamina pool increase and the introduction of resilience. However, in arenas with teammates aiding the damage, stunlocking can still be deadly and frustrates your opponent to no end. With hemo and improved gouge, this build is certainly the way to do it. You can achieve near perfect stunlocks with good timing. You can also use sleight of hand in this build for an extra 2% resilience-esque action instead of something else in the sub tree. This build is for PvP only. Old level 60 builds Please see Rogue builds/Level 60 Leveling to 60 For soloing, grinding, and leveling, you will want to focus on swords and put a majority of your points into the Assassination and Combat trees. Leveling with daggers is possible, especially with a group, but is less efficient soloing than leveling with swords. Until you start partying regularly, and doing instances, you will want to stick with swords as your primary weapons. Sword/Dagger is perfectly fine until you take sword specialization, after which time you will want to get yourself a speedy, high DPS sword for your offhand. Levels 10-39 * Improved Sinister Strike 2/2 * Remorseless Attacks 2/2 * Malice 3/5 * Ruthlessness 3/3 * Malice 5/5 * Relentless Strikes 1/1 * Lethality 5/5 * Murder 2/2 * Improved Eviscerate 2/3 * Cold Blood 1/1 * Improved Kidney Shot 3/3 * Improved Eviscerate 3/3 * Seal Fate 3/5 http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=fGebox0scZM Level 40 (Respec) * Improved Sinister Strike 2/2 * Improved Gouge 3/3 * Deflection 5/5 * Riposte 1/1 * Endurance 2/2 * Precision 5/5 * Dual Wield Specialization 5/5 * Blade Flurry 1/1 * Sword Specialization 5/5 * Aggression 1/3 * Adrenaline Rush 1/1 http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=wZG0Ed0Vzx0oo Levels 41-60 * Aggression 3/3 * Improved Eviscerate 3/3 * Malice 3/5 * Murder 2/2 * Malice 5/5 * Relentless Strikes 1/1 * Lethality 5/5 * Ruthlessness 2/3 http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=whgboxZG0Ed0Vzx0ho Category:Guides Category:Rogue Talents